It turns out your Klout score may carry a lot more weight than you'd like to think. For that matter, you might not even know you have a Klout score - or what a Klout score is to begin with.

When Sam Fiorella went to a job interview for a VP position at a marketing agency, he was surprised to learn that his Klout score, which measures your social media influence online, was too low:

With 15 years of experience consulting for major brands like AOL, Ford, and Kraft, Fiorella felt confident in his qualifications. But midway through the interview, he was caught off guard when his interviewer asked him for his Klout score. Fiorella hesitated awkwardly before confessing that he had no idea what a Klout score was.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

Partly intrigued, partly scared, Fiorella spent the next six months working feverishly to boost his Klout score, eventually hitting 72. As his score rose, so did the number of job offers and speaking invitations he received. “Fifteen years of accomplishments weren’t as important as that score,” he says.

I can understand on one level why a marketing firm might want someone with social media influence, but simply having a decent Klout score doesn't mean you're any good at marketing. I can pretty much guarantee that Fiorella's 15 years of marketing experience make him a better candidate than me, for instance, with my zero years of marketing experience.

And yet, my Klout score tends to hover around 64, a full 30 points above Fiorella's. That hardly makes me a better marketing employee than him, however, though it does mean that I've done passably well when it comes to marketing myself on social media.

Really, though, it's that last bit that's important, and growing ever more so. In the age of social media, everyone becomes a brand. We all have to self-promote and occupy what social media haunts we can. Not all of us have people to do that for us, so we're forced to monitor our own reputation online, to make sure our work is out there on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and maybe even Pinterest. And that's only a handful of the places that will influence your Klout score.

It's time-consuming, and not always as much fun as doing your actual work, but it's important. Even if you're not a public figure or a blogger.

At least, for employers it appears as though it's becoming more important. On the heels of reports of employers asking for Facebook login information from prospective employees, it's becoming painfully clear that we're only just learning how to grapple with the twin realities of our real life and online experiences.